Continuing with Sustainability

In my first blog post I talked about a number of topics including how to define sustainability. And thanks to the holidays I was able to clear a bit of head space to think a bit more about this post.

The reason for defining sustainability, or the spectrum of sustainability, is so you can be clear with readers what it is you mean when you use the word. But the question that came to me over the holidays, how important is it to use the word at all? Because I feel the word is vague, manipulable, and, well, a somewhat mythical concept.

But do you actually need to use the word for your readers to know what you are talking about? The more I think about, I feel I could more effectively talk about sustainability but talking about the principles of sustainability or the components of sustainability.

I think instead of talking agricultural sustainability I might simply talk about agriculture systems which serve humanity. Which takes us back to spectrum thinking and finding that balance between the economic reality of operating a farm vs the need to serve humanity – which, it could be argued, all human endeavours should strive to do.